About The Film
Welcome to our Crowdfundr campaign for the production phase of "There’s a Lane for Us Here," a documentary created by Lionheart Narratives LLC. Your generous support during this initial phase will assist us in covering the necessary costs to successfully complete our production phase. This fundraising effort includes supplementing filming final interviews and scenes, acquiring crucial archival imagery, and supporting essential research and translations.
Our film dives into the history and legacy of Denver’s Little Saigon Business District, where Vietnamese and Southeast Asian refugees rebuilt a sense of home through businesses, traditions, and commemorative spaces. As the first immigrant generation ages and longtime businesses face uncertainty, the next generation is left to wrestle with what it means to carry forward memory, identity, and belonging.
We explore the tension between preservation and change and permanence and impermanence. The idea of "forever" isn't only about permanence in stone and concrete but about the act of remembering, of carrying history forward through stories, traditions, and the next generation. With urban redevelopment and the refugee generation aging, we ask, how do we ensure their memories live on as the next generation takes the lead?
Why this project is important
Few documentaries examine Little Saigons nationwide, despite their profound historical and cultural significance. Too often, documentaries flatten refugee communities into symbols of suffering or relics of the past. While these violent histories are certainly part of our story, they are not our community’s whole story. “There’s a Lane for Us Here” challenges the dominant narratives that have long defined Vietnamese American communities through the narrow lens of war, trauma, and assimilation. This film pushes beyond that by honoring the joy, humor, tension, and complexity of everyday life in Denver’s Little Saigon.
This is a story of place-making and place-keeping, how immigrant communities built a vibrant business district from the ground up, and how the next generation grapples with fading cultural memories. We seek to minimize historical erasure by preserving the sights, sounds, and intergenerational stories that define us as an enclave .
Why we need your support
My family’s story, like many in our community, is rooted in the refugee experience after the Vietnam War. I grew up around Little Saigon Denver, which has always been a place of fortitude, joy, cultural vibrancy, and also unspoken pain. As I’ve witnessed my parents and elders age, and as Denver develops rapidly, I feel an urgent need to preserve these stories to show how our community is not just a relic of the past but a foundation for a brilliant future.
Many on our team are volunteering our time and resources to complete this project. We are extremely grateful for the hard work of our partners, including Colorado Asian Pacific United and History Colorado, to obtain funds for us—but the film’s complexity has grown. As an intergenerational, multi-business, and community-centered story with various arcs, the scope of the film now calls for a feature-length format. We’re seeking additional support to help film and complete the last stages of production.
Your contribution will help us finish filming our final interviews and scenes, create illustrations, and acquire crucial archival imagery to evoke a strong sense of memory and place. It will also support the time-intensive research and translations required to represent our under-documented histories carefully, especially vital for a community whose contributions and experiences, beyond the lens of war, have long been neglected in mainstream media. Our funding goal covers the very bare minimum to execute the production phase of our documentary.
Every donation helps us carry this story home.
Highlights
See all activity12About Us
Hannah Tran
Hannah Tran (she/her) is a
Vietnamese-American documentary filmmaker from Denver,
Colorado. Over the years, her experience in visual
storytelling, journalism, and documentary film has exposed her
to a wide spectrum of identities, cultures, and communities.
As a result, she better understands the nuances and
complexities that come with every community. This has deepened
her concern to critically evaluate her positionality and
approaches in the storytelling process.
Hannah has received national
recognition for her work as a journalist and as a senior
video/digital media producer at Colorado State University. She
has received awards from the Asian American Journalists
Association, the National Press Photographers Association, and
the Telly Awards. Hannah's recent work explores cultural
preservation, identity, and adaptation within displaced and
diasporic communities, drawing inspiration and knowledge from
her family's experiences as Vietnam War refugees.
In addition to making documentaries,
Hannah works closely with Colorado State University's
cultural centers to create videos that highlight a variety
of student perspectives, especially those that engage in
social critique and address systemic issues in their lived
and academic lives. From CSU to her freelance work, Hannah
is especially drawn to stories of future changemakers that
disrupt and challenge dominant frameworks that are reductive
for underserved communities.
Hannah is the proud owner of her LLC,
Lionheart Narratives, inspired by her childhood’s favorite
animal: the lion. The lion represents courage and
protection.Hannah gravitates towards stories of those who
experience fragmentation of the mind and spirit through
life’s hardships and injustices. She finds this is an ode to
stories of courageous resistance and the reclamation and
protection of the wholeness of the
heart. | Dougal Brownlie
Dougal Brownlie (he/him) is an
award-winning visual storyteller and documentary filmmaker. He
was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and raised in the small
sleepy, and beautiful town of Bellingham, Washington. He is
the proud founder and owner of Roots to Restaurants, a
business launched in October 2024 that centers around the
powerful connection to food, as well as Brownlie Creative, a
company that offers a diverse set of creative services. Based
in the Greater Seattle Area, he travels frequently to document
important visual moments wherever they unfold.
He committed to crafting immersive,
visually compelling narratives that celebrate diverse
cultures, backgrounds, and the connections we form with
others—whether they are loved ones or strangers. He is deeply
passionate about creating human-centered documentaries and
visuals that amplify the voices of historically marginalized
communities through trust, empathy, and authenticity.
After over a decade of traveling for
work, he is excited to be back in his home state of
Washington, surrounded by the beauty of the Pacific Northwest.
Previously, he worked as a media producer at the University of
Washington in Seattle and as a staff photojournalist for the
Colorado Springs Gazette along Colorado’s Front Range, and the
St. Joseph News-Press in Northwest Missouri.
When he is not behind the camera or
editing photos and documentaries, you can find him traveling,
having solo car dance sessions to Above & Beyond,
binge-watching The Great British Bake Off (or any cooking
show), and experimenting with new baking recipes in the
kitchen. He also enjoys watching and playing tennis, trying
new restaurants and speakeasies, helping a local queer
youth-focused non-profit, and spending quality time with his
partner, Nick. | Vicky Vien
Vicky Vien (she/her) is a production
sound mixer based in the Front Range of Colorado. She is a
first-generation Chinese/Vietnamese American from Louisville,
Colorado. Much of her youth was spent at her family’s
restaurant in Downtown Louisville, where she and her sister
and cousins would often get into all sorts of shenanigans.
Having grown up alongside many of her extended family, she
places a strong emphasis on building new relationships and
creating community with those around her.
She graduated from the University of
Colorado Denver with a BFA in Film and Television. During this
four-year program, her cohort worked on many films, and she
soon grew quite fond of working in the sound department. With
each film she worked on, she became increasingly drawn to the
idea that sound is one of the most intimate elements of a
film. She finds that she can connect more deeply with others
and understand their processes better, as she is often one of
the only people who truly hears them through a microphone.
Sound also comes with the added perk of occasionally getting
stand-up routines or concerts from a mic’d-up person across
the room.
In an industry that places a lot of
emphasis on networking, she prioritizes fostering
relationships with people she has met and connecting on topics
that resonate beyond technical skills. She is passionate about
working alongside fellow BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ filmmakers who
seek further representation, both on-screen and behind the
scenes. | My Linh Mac
My Linh Mac (she/her) is a Saigonsese
multi-media artist, visual designer, and art educator based in
Fort Collins, Colorado. Mac is best known for her digital
paintings, traditional oil paintings, and her series of
contemporary ‘galactic /no-brush’ paintings- Ranbu. As an
accomplished painter, her works portray beauty in humble
places with her signature style of deep and vibrant accent
colors. Mac discovered nontraditional techniques bring further
variety to her paintings through the use of color and medium
manipulation and exploring different possibilities with
hybrid-like presentation platforms. What makes her work stand
out among young emerging artists is how she incorporates not
only technical skills and knowledge from multiple creative
fields of design, art, and technologies; but also, her
personal experience and cultural exposure from different parts
of the world as a traveler.
Mac's works have been displayed at art
exhibitions and showcases around the world. She demonstrates
an exceptional talent for creating depth and dimension in her
iconic series ‘Ranbu’ (2019) and ‘Constellation’ (2022),
incorporating traditional painting techniques and
unconventional design elements to produce a unique visual
language. Her abstract works are represented by institutions
worldwide including the Queen Victoria Museum and Gallery in
Tasmania, Australia, the Angard Art Hotel in St. Louis,
Missouri, the Brauer Museum in Valparaiso, the Czong Institute
for Contemporary Art (CICA) Museum in Gimpo, South Korea, and
the Museum of Outstanding Design (MOOD) in Como, Italy.
Mac's work reflects my quirky approach to
colors, blending the structures, principles, and utility of
design with the rawness, chaos, and freedom of fine art. In
her multidisciplinary works, she discovered her artistic niche
by manipulating materials and presentation platforms to create
art in one medium that looks to have been created in another. |
